Broadcast network content, or programming, is commonly mixed with informational content, or assets. These assets include advertisements, associated programming, public service announcements, ad tags, trailers, weather or emergency notifications and a variety of other content, including both paid and unpaid content. For example, a television network may broadcast a television program to a wide and diverse audience. Asset providers (e.g., advertisers) desiring to convey information regarding services and/or products (e.g., television commercials) may provide assets to the broadcast network or content providers such that the assets may be aired in connection with the television program. Assets are typically interleaved with the broadcast network programming, or content, during the predetermined intervals in the programming (e.g., commercial breaks designated by cues within the programming). In a similar fashion, audio assets may be interleaved with audio only broadcast network programming, such as tower broadcast radio and satellite radio.
Asset providers typically pay broadcast network programmers for the opportunity to deliver assets to an audience. These asset providers typically desire to direct their assets to a selected audience rather than broadcasting their information to all potential audience segments because that would generally be a waste of resources (e.g., certain audience members may not be of interest to the asset provider). To illustrate, an advertiser desirous of delivering a commercial conveying information about men's shaving products may not be particularly interested in delivering the commercial to women or children. Because of this desired directing of assets, audience sampling, such as that performed by Nielsen Media Research Corp. (Nielsen), was established to delineate audiences into sectors. For example, the audience sampling may classify audience members into groups based on gender, ethnicity, income level, number of family members, locale, etc.
Audience sampling is often performed via the monitoring of selected households. For example, a monitoring company may provide equipment to a number of households. The member households may comprise a fairly diverse audience with profiles in each household being known to the monitoring company. As such, a monitoring company may monitor the observation patterns of the member households to roughly associate audience profiles with certain content (e.g., television programs). That is, the monitoring company roughly extrapolates the observation patterns of the member households to the audience at large; a process that produces what is generally referred to as ratings.
The case of television advertisements is illustrative. Today, advertisers direct their assets based on ratings. For example, an asset provider may wish to display an ad within a certain programming time slot if the rating for that time slot substantially corresponds to the target audience for the asset (e.g., an asset provider may wish to show a shaving add during a programming time slot having a relatively high rating among males between the ages of 18 and 32). In the best case, however, a significant mismatch of the audience to advertisers' targets still occurs. For example, a programming time slot having a relatively high rating among males between the ages of 18 and 32 may still have a relatively large percentage of female viewers or other viewers that are not of interest to the advertiser.
Additionally, the growth in the number of programming channels available to end users of content (e.g., television viewers and radio listeners) has contributed to the difficulty in reaching these users. For example, because audience members are dispersed over many programming channels and audience sampling cannot reach every member of the audience, ratings for certain programs may be insubstantial or immeasurable. In this regard, asset providers may not wish to deliver assets to certain programming channels even though these channels in the aggregate represent large portions of their target audience. Because of these missed opportunities, advertisers miss potential exposure for their goods and services, and Multiple Systems Operators (“MSOs”; e.g., cable television operators or other network operators) and/or program providers may lose income. Additionally, for viewers, this may amount to lost exposure to assets of potential interest or, at the least, reduced advertiser subsidization of network content costs
A number of targeted advertising systems have been proposed. Some of the systems involve a forward and store architecture where ad content is delivered to user equipment ahead of time and stored for delivery during commercial breaks as appropriate. However, these systems generally entail substantial storage requirements and may require equipment upgrades for many viewers. Additionally, these systems may involve considerable uncertainty regarding what advertisements were actually delivered, thus undermining the objective of improved appeal to advertisers. Other proposed systems involve selecting ads on a network platform based on a user profile and addressing ads to particular households. Unfortunately, this entails privacy concerns and requires addressable delivery rather than broadcast mode transmission. More generally, proposed targeted advertising systems have largely failed to gain the acceptance needed to address the inherent inefficiencies in the conventional broadcast network advertising paradigm.